Chad Dean moved his life, and the happiness of his wife and two children, in positive steps when he appeared on TLC’s My 600-lb Life. Weighing in at 701 pounds, Dean was no longer able to work his job as a long haul trucker and relied on his family for…
Plenty of people in baseball have written a book. There’s Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, Josh Lewin’s You Never Forget Your First — hell, even actress Alyssa Milano has written a book about baseball. Eric Nadel, the radio announcer and voice of the Texas Rangers, has written three books, but his…
We hope you’re thirsty because two tall drinks of water are coming to town. Drew and Jonathan Scott, twin brothers, best-selling authors and stars of Property Brothers among other major career ventures, are making a pit stop in Frisco to promote their first children’s book, Builder Brothers Big Plans. Women…
It’s 1:30 p.m. Thursday and New York City is at full speed. From the Upper East Side to Wall Street, cabs are honking and couriers race on bicycles. This is prime earning time for Ryan Serhant. He’s gracious but clear, “I have 15 minutes for this call,” he tells the…
Comic book stories can take place in any location imaginable; the only constraints are the writer’s imagination. With all those possibilities to set a story, it’s surprising how many times the chosen location is Dallas. Dallas is a city of culture and history, but it’s hard to compare it to…
The visual most people have of a comic book is of a brightly colored superhero flying over the city, fist-fighting an equally brightly colored supervillain. A fan of the medium is already aware of the amount of personal, story-driven works present in modern comics, but a large part of the…
The owner of Oak Cliff bookstore The Wild Detectives became aware of literary gender inequality and wanted to do something about it. He approached Lauren Smart, who was then the arts editor for the Dallas Observer and now works as a professor at Southern Methodist University, to program an entire month…
It’s a fairly simple concept. On Friday night, five women will strip down, get onstage and crack open some books. It’s a game plan that Naked Girls Reading has played out across since its first event in 2010. It’s not an act of tantalization, at least not in the way…
For nearly seven decades, the house at 314 W. Eighth St. in Oak Cliff was merely a domicile. Nothing more than a place to keep your stuff dry when it rains and plug in your refrigerator. That was before Javier García del Moral and Paco Vique owned it. Four years…
Although they came from diverse backgrounds, a common thread links the women in Mary Dodson Wade’s latest book, Amazing Texas Girls. “I wanted to call this book Gumption,” Wade says, “because I see that.” Amazing Texas Girls, released Sunday by publisher Lone Star Books, trails the lives of 15 women,…
Tyra Banks was up at 4 a.m. the day after Easter to appear on the Today show with her mother. They were promoting their new book, Perfect is Boring: 10 Things My Crazy, Fierce Mama Taught Me About Beauty, Booty and Being a Boss. But Banks’ mom, Carolyn London isn’t…
Writing a memoir about your family that holds nothing back sounds like a perfect way to make every Thanksgiving awkward for the rest of your life. But Dianna de la Garza, the mother Demi Lovato, says the pop singer, as well as her other daughters, Dallas Lovato and Madison de…
It all began with the idea to sell organic 1-pound pumpkins. Although Free Range Pumpkins, Arlington’s newest geek culture warehouse, never sold pumpkins, owners Herb and Amy Kaplan sold lots of other stuff through Amazon. Now they’ve opened their first brick-and-mortar store. A decade ago, it might have been the…
The inspiration for a new children’s book geared toward Dallasites, Goodnight Lakewood, arrived at bedtime. “One night, we were reading books before bedtime with our older son, Mack, who was 3 at the time,” author and Lakewood resident Jaclyn Amend says. “One of his favorite books was a ‘goodnight’ book…
This list, arranged in no particular order, is limited to books that were published in 2017 and written by authors who live in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Sandcastle Empire by Kayla Olson This dystopian thriller, published in June, focuses on a formerly privileged girl named Eden who escapes a labor camp…
First, he was a child prodigy who talked at 7 months. Later, he did enough cocaine to kill a baby rhinoceros. In a new authorized biography titled Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman, author Mary Lou Sullivan digs into the Texas Jewboy. And it turns…
They spent long periods of time tapping away at a keyboard in isolation and were ballsy enough to tell someone, perhaps a less-than-flattering editor somewhere, only to receive a rejection slip in return. Now, they have an audience. The literary series Rejected: Stories Unsold debuted at Wild Detectives bookstore last…
The pages of Abandon Me, a collection of essays by Melissa Febos, are filled with extraordinary and honest details of the author’s traumatic past. Febos, who will read from and discuss her work at The Wild Detectives on Thursday, takes us on her journey to find her birth father and…
The early days of comic books featured some ethnically diverse and multidimensional characters, but they were few and far between. Most nonwhite characters reinforced stereotypes and served as C- and D-tier backup to blond-haired, blue-eyed superheroes. “Growing up with superheroes like the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Spider-Man, Batman and Superman,…
Bobby Goldstein has been in Dallas since he attended college at Southern Methodist University. Afterward, he went to Waco to earn a law degree from Baylor. Still not positive what he wanted to do when he grew up, he had a vision for Cheaters, a Dallas-based show about catching, well,…
Hector Rodriguez says he finally heard his calling to become a superhero comic artist and publish a superhero story that he created in college when a student came to him in tears. His father, the student said, had been deported. “He’s crying and that kind of hit me,” Rodriguez says. “What…
What are we even doing with our lives? That’s the question Dallas native Mary Dauterman and her co-author, BuzzFeed Animals editor Chelsea Marshall, pose in their new satirical children’s book of the same name. In the book — released by Harper Collins on Aug. 8 — the characters live in…
